Donald Trump’s legal team on Thursday cited President Biden’s call for the former president to be locked up in a motion demanding the dismissal of the federal 2020 election interference case.
“The proposed motion establishes that this unjust case was dead on arrival — unconstitutional even before its inception,” Trump attorneys wrote in the filing submitted in the US District Court for the District of Columbia.
The lawyers argued to Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over the case, that Attorney General Merrick Garland violated the Constitution when he appointed special counsel Jack Smith to oversee multiple federal investigations into Trump.
The former president’s attorneys also claim that Garland tapped Smith at President Biden’s request “to target” Trump – citing the 81-year-old president’s stunning remark earlier this week in New Hampshire.
“In November 2022, the Attorney General violated the Appointments Clause by naming private-citizen Smith to target President Trump, while President Trump was campaigning to take back the Oval Office from the Attorney General’s boss, without a statutory basis for doing so,” the filing states.
“Garland did so following improper public urging from President Biden to target President Trump, as reported at the time in 2022, and repeated recently by President Biden through his inappropriate instruction to ‘lock him up’ while Smith presses forward with the case unlawfully as the Presidential election rapidly approaches,” it continues.
On Tuesday, Biden declared, “We gotta lock him up,” in an apparent reference to Trump’s legal woes.
After a four-second pause, Biden attempted to walk back the remark.
“Politically, lock him up — lock him out, that’s what we’ve got to do,” he said.
Trump, 78, was convicted in May by a Manhattan jury of 34 criminal counts of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels in the final weeks of the 2016 campaign.
The 45th president’s sentencing in that case, which was brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat, is scheduled for Nov. 26.
US District Judge for the Southern District of Florida Aileen Cannon dismissed Smith’s other federal case against Trump in July on the same grounds that Thursday’s motion calls for.
Cannon, a Trump-appointee, ruled that the case relating to Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified White House documents could not move forward due to the “unlawful appointment and funding of Special Counsel Jack Smith.”
Federal prosecutors are appealing that ruling.
“Everything that Smith did since Attorney General Garland’s appointment, as President Trump continued his leading campaign against President Biden and then Vice President Harris, was unlawful and unconstitutional,” the former president’s lawyers wrote Thursday.
“That includes Smith’s separate violation of the Appropriations Clause by relying on an appropriation that does not apply in order to take more than $20 million from taxpayers — in addition to Smith improperly relying on more than $16 million in additional funds from other unspecified ‘DOJ components’ — for use in wrongfully targeting President Trump and his allies during the height of the campaign season,” they added.
Smith’s team has until Oct. 31 to file a response.